The Case Of The
Missing Brain(Now That It's Found, Where Does It
Belong?)

By Ellen Kuwana
Neuroscience for Kids Staff Writer
April 14, 1999

The Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. is a brainy place. It is the
guardian for more than 300 human brains, all stored in a
climate-controlled facility in Maryland. One of these brains has been
receiving a lot of attention lately.

In 1911, Ishi, a Native American, stumbled out of the Californian
wilderness and was befriended by anthropologists. He was the last member
of the Yahi, a tribe of California Indians. White settlers had directly or
indirectly contributed to their numbers dwindling from 20,000 to 1 in less
than a century.

Ishi spent the next five years living at the University of California San
Francisco campus and sharing with the anthropologists his language (one of
the anthropologists spoke a dialect that Ishi could understand), beliefs,
and tribal arts. Exposed to a society with diseases that were foreign to
him, Ishi contracted tuberculosis and died in 1916. He was cremated and
the urn containing his ashes was placed in a cemetery in a city just south
of San Francisco. However, we now know that his brain was not buried with
him.

The Smithsonian

In February 1999, according to an article published in the Seattle Times
(March 25, 1999, page A10), two researchers announced that they had found
a letter stating that Ishi's brain had been removed during autopsy and
sent to the Smithsonian Museum.

Why the controversy? Eighty-three years after his death,
Ishi's brain is a much-fought-over item. A federal law called the Native
American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act states that Indian
remains held by Federally funded institutions must be returned to their
tribe or tribal descendants. Native Americans believe that the spirit of
the deceased cannot travel to the afterlife until their remains are buried
whole. Because Ishi was the last of his people, there are no direct
descendents to bury his remains--in this case--his brain.

A group of Northern California Indians have proposed that they be given
custody of Ishi's brain, which they will bury in the area of California
where his people once lived. Although this seems like a reasonable
solution, the Smithsonian has launched a search for Ishi's descendants, or
people more closely related to him than the group of Northern Californian
Indians. As a result of this search, Smithsonian researchers have found
nine Americans who claim to have descended from the Yana, a sub-tribe of
the Yahi. Further complicating the situation is an assertion by some
researchers that Ishi was probably not full Yahi, but was perhaps half
Maidu or Wintu.